


Children of War

by Shampain



Series: Epoch [5]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Some Plot, as they do - Freeform, old soldiers having a drink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27962135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shampain/pseuds/Shampain
Summary: Rose and Poe discuss the events of Exegol, and the history behind Armitage's scar.
Relationships: Poe Dameron & Rose Tico, Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Series: Epoch [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1822489
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	Children of War

36 ABY

Armitage was a restless sleeper. Poe couldn’t say he was surprised to find that out – even in touched-up propaganda holos General Hux looked like he badly needed a vacation – but it did make for interesting nights sometimes when Armitage managed to wake him up with it. Poe, himself, slept like the dead; the minute he closed his eyes, he was out.

He didn’t wake just because he felt the bed move, though that certainly added to it. But as the mattress shifted he noticed how the sheets clung to his legs and, with a groan, he rolled over in bed and reached out for Armitage. The spot on the bed was empty, but warm, too warm. He felt Armitage’s fingers in his hair.

“The generators must have blown,” he said. “Go back to sleep, Poe.”

He groaned again. “Kriff, it’s hot,” he groused, kicking the blankets off. How long had the cooling system been off? No wonder he was covered in sweat.

There was a hearty banging sound at the door. “That’ll be Tico,” Armitage said.

“Or someone who wants you to go wake her up,” Poe said. His eyes adjusting to the darkness, he watched as Armitage pulled on a shirt, ran his fingers through his hair in an attempt to tame it. “Mmmn. You want me to come help?”

“Help how? Hold the flashlight and give us bad advice?”

“You’re horrible. Very horrible to me.”

Armitage came to sit on Poe’s side of the bed while he got his boots on, lacing them up with military efficiency even in the dark. Poe ran his hand over Armitage’s thigh, to his knee, and the other man leaned down to press his lips to Poe’s cheek. “Go back to sleep,” he said, this time softly.

The banging started up again. “You’re being summoned.”

“That I am,” Armitage said.

Poe watched him leave and, sighing, stretched out alone on the bed. It really was the height of irony that the two people most qualified on CY-78 to fix the electricity were Rose and Armitage. He could hear them both talking at the front door before it closed, a sort of teasing jab from Rose and a mild response from Armitage. Then, silence; the silence of a settlement with absolutely no power.

It was also ironic that Poe was a war hero and he still couldn’t manage to get the Republic to send him new generators and put an end to these emergency repairs. Annoyed, Poe rolled onto his stomach, fulling expecting to lay awake, hot and sticky and uncomfortable, until Armitage returned. Instead he was asleep again within minutes.

  
  


38 ABY

When the lights went out in the bar Poe paused with his drink halfway to his lips, because for a moment he was back on CY-78, in the comforting dark, Armitage within reach. But it was just an electrical short, and with a few shouts from the other patrons the lights flickered back on, and he was back to being in a tavern on some nowhere planet where everyone left him alone.

Except for people who should know better, though. Like Rose Tico, of all people, standing in the doorway and looking around. For a moment Poe thought the temporary blackout had done something to his eyesight, and he was just seeing a ghost from his past flickering there, soon to disappear. But instead she locked eyes with him and came forward.

She was smiling, but Poe was not about to humour her. “How did you find me?” he asked, bluntly.

Her smile faded, but she shrugged. “Not difficult,” she said. “Your droid is kind of famous.”

Poe glanced over to where BB-8 was sitting, his head swivelling about to look at him, and then at Rose, and then back at him. “Maybe we should get you a new paint job, buddy,” he said. The droid beeped uncertainly.

Rose nodded at his table. “Can I?”

There was no getting rid of her now that she was here, he knew that much. She clearly had something to say to him, and Poe wasn’t in the mood to get up and leave. He was a bit drunk, for one. He shrugged, but kicked the other, empty chair out for her to take.

Seeing the new customer, the proprietor hurried over. “Another flagon of spotchka?” she asked.

Rose nodded, her gaze not leaving Poe’s. “And a glass.”

They sat like that, the silence burning between them, until the proprietor came back. She placed the second flagon and cup down on the table, and collected Rose’s credits. She had, no doubt, been present during many a tense meeting among rogues, and sure enough Poe saw her watching them carefully while pretending to busy herself with wiping the bar down, making sure a fight wasn’t about to start. That told him, more than anything, that she didn’t recognize either of them. They were both too different now.

Rose refreshed Poe’s glass without asking, and filled her own. She had let her hair grow long, and it framed her face like dark, sooty curtains; it made her look older than she was. “Nice beard,” she said.

Poe scratched at his chin in recognition of what she said, but he didn’t add anything else.

She nodded. “I know you’re angry. I don’t blame you. But…” she trailed off, suddenly looking uncomfortable. She took a sip of her drink and sighed, leaning back in her chair. She wasn’t in uniform, he noticed; she wasn’t wearing anything that could tie her to anyone, be it an organization or a corporation. That didn’t mean she wasn’t getting paid for the conversation, though. Poe wouldn’t put anything past her.

Finally, even Poe’s surliness could not fend off his innate impatience any longer. “What do you want, Rose?”

“I wanted to see you,” she said. “And talk to you. It’s not right, you know that.”

“What?”

“You, being here,” she said. “While Hux is there. It’s not right.”

Poe felt his temper flare abruptly; just as quickly it was gone, and he felt cold, and empty. “It’s what we agreed on,” he said. “And honestly, Rose, it’s none of your damn business.”

“No, it is,” she said. “The trial is in two days and he’s going to lose. You should be there for him.”

“They won’t let me.”

“We could try to make them,” she said, and her tone was so helpful, and so earnest, that for a moment Poe forgot why he was angry with her – he saw only the Rose he had always known, kind-hearted and true, not the spineless coward that had turned her back on them. “You, and me, together. We could try to get something real done. We could ask-”

“Rose,” Poe interrupted. His face felt hot. Rage or inebriation? “What are you trying to do, here? Are you trying to show me that you actually care? Because I don’t buy it. If you did, you’d be there right now as a character witness.”

“Poe-”

“I know they asked you,” he snapped. “And I know you turned them down. That bastard Serz told me. They thought you’d have _lots_ of terrible things to tell the court, and for a moment I figured, well, maybe he has a chance-”

“ _Poe-_ ”

“- _and you said no_.” Poe picked up his cup and drained it. Rose watched him in silence, her eyes gone dark and thoughtful and sad – yes, sad, even though he couldn't fathom why. “You could have told them the truth, that he’s a changed man. You could have saved him.”

“No.” A steely edge had appeared in her voice, but Poe just snorted, moving to pour himself more spotchka. She reached out and wrapped her hand around his wrist, stopping him before he could. “Poe, listen to me. Please.”

Poe shook her hand off, but he gave up on drinking more. Instead he crossed his arms and nodded, wondering if he looked as angry as he felt, or if Rose just saw him pouting.

“I won’t deny that they asked me,” she said. “And it’s true, they thought I was a perfect candidate for the HoloNet, what with our… history. But I wouldn’t have saved him, Poe. We both know that.”

The terrible part was that Rose was right. No one was more surprised than Armitage that Rose did not hate him to his very bones because she had every right to: he was part of an organization that had destroyed her planet and her family, and then he’d mocked her for it. But even so, despite her apparent change of heart, no committee would have cared. Rose would have been only a single voice, but even if they had gathered together every person living in CY-78 to give positive testimony it wouldn’t have mattered: the Republic already had all of that information in their files, and they did not care. Armitage was a symbol, and he would have to be symbolically destroyed.

Poe looked away, gazed at the tavern that was now becoming busier as night fell. He’d been there for three days, sitting in the corner, quietly drinking. People were starting to ignore his presence. Soon he would be indistinguishable from furniture. He couldn’t wait for that to happen; he wanted to dissolve into nothingness. Instead Rose had walked through the door, and she had seen him.

“But why didn’t you even try?” he asked, quietly.

That seemed to be the question Rose had been bracing herself for, because the tension fell away from her face and her shoulders loosened. “It would have meant breaking a promise.”

BB-8 finally spoke up, whistling gently, and Rose grimaced at him. Poe looked at his droid with surprise. “It’s not about her,” she said. “It’s not about any of that.”

“Then what is it about?” Poe asked. They’d all lost people, but Rose… she had lost her home, her parents, and finally her sister on a bomber run under Poe’s own orders. If she wanted to blame someone then she had a lot of options. If it turned out that this was all because Rose could not forgive him for Paige, then maybe he could make sense of it.

Rose sighed. This time when he reached for the flagon she did not stop him. “It’s about what happened over Exegol.”

“Which part?” Poe asked, dryly. “There were a lot of things happening that day.”

She gave a half-hearted laugh, amused despite herself, it seemed. “It’s about Hux’s scar,” she said. “The one I gave him.”

 _Yeah, when you tried to kill him_ , Poe thought. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

“Did he ever talk to you about it?”

Poe raised one shoulder in a shrug. “No,” he said. “There wasn’t much to talk about. Everyone knows the story.”

There had been so, so many stories told and retold in the days after the battle: of Ben Solo’s redemption, of Rey’s death and return, of Finn’s victory. Stories about Poe, too, though he did his best not to listen to them.

There was also the story of Rose and Armitage, in a war room floating high above the action. Rose was there directing three of the major assaults on Exegol from above. Armitage had been there because the Rebellion needed everyone – even prison guards – to fight, and no one wanted him locked away alone lest he manage some sort of slippery escape.

Despite being cuffed he’d gone for an unattended console, and Rose had – rather violently – intercepted him. It turned out he’d been attempting to direct fire at several cloaked First Order ships, and the rest was – literally – history, another detail to tack on to his changed life. The injury had been too minor to treat immediately, so by the time any of the medics decided to take a look at Armitage bacta would have done him no good. The cut had already begun to heal, and the scar was there to stay.

Everyone at base camp had been oddly fascinated by it; admittedly, the story was what had Poe thinking, in the early days of Armitage’s detention, that his defection from the First Order was not just about getting even with Kylo Ren after all.

But neither Armitage nor Rose seemed to give it much thought, even months later when they were arguing with each other over the generators, or cooking something up in the workshop. In fact, Poe was surprised that Rose was bringing it up now after so long ignoring it, even in the face of people who decided she was legendary for it.

“I hated being in that room with him,” Rose said, quietly. “Just knowing he was near made my skin crawl. You’ve never lost a sibling, Poe. I don’t blame you for her – it was war, and we understood fighting had its risks – but it hurt. It still does. I don’t think I’ll ever stop hurting when I think about Paige. It’s like walking around with an open wound, and you never know what’s gonna brush against it.”

“I’m sorry-”

She held up her hand to stop him. “I told you,” she said. Poe wanted to look away, but he found he couldn’t – Rose’s expression was so raw despite how composed she was. There was a tremble beneath her face, like she was close to the image shattering. “I don’t blame you. But it made me so angry, that hurt. Do you know what I mean? Just this... raging frustration at the inherent _unfairness_ of the world. It made me feel vicious. All I wanted, all I hoped for, was someone I could hold responsible. Someone I could punish. That was _him_ , and he was there in the room with me, and I begged the universe to give me a reason – any reason – to kill him. To create some sort of balance in the world. Because without Paige that’s all I was, unbalanced.”

Rose stopped to take a drink. She seemed to have trouble swallowing, as if she had to push away a sob. Poe wanted to reach out to her now because, despite his anger, and his lack of understanding, Rose was his friend. He watched her take a deep breath and rub the bridge of her nose. “Sorry,” she said, shakily. “I didn’t think I’d have to talk about this again. We agreed we wouldn’t.”

Poe started. “We?”

“Hux.”

Poe put down his spotchka, leaning forward. Next to him, BB-8 shifted back and forth, uncertainly. “Rose, what are you saying?”

The smile on her face was small, and forced. “I’m saying that when I saw him move, I had every intention to give him the most ignominious death a war criminal could ever ask for, and when I saw what he was doing, I was even more convinced.”

“He was-”

“Trying to protect us? No,” Rose said. “No, he wasn’t.”

For a moment, Poe couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. It didn’t make any sense and yet, there she was, confessing to the crime as only an honest sinner could.

“You need to understand why we can’t talk about this openly,” she said. Her voice had gone very quiet. “It’s important. It’s why I could never submit to the court, in case they were able to get the truth out. See, Hux was looking at the _Steadfast_. No one was paying attention to anything that wasn’t firing at us, so no one else saw, but he – we – did. It was practically _bleeding_ escape pods, hundreds of them. He was trying to misdirect us from them.”

“Why didn’t anyone know this?” Poe demanded. “Why isn’t this… what’s the secret-”

“The secret, Poe, is that I let him.”

She leaned back in her seat, glancing around. No one was looking at them; and the invisible wall that was everyone else’s conversation kept theirs private. Still, she looked nervous. “This has to stay between us,” she said. “I promised him I wouldn’t say anything, but I guess it hardly matters now, does it? The thing is, Poe, those escape pods were full of kids.”

“ _What_?”

“From the Stormtrooper training program,” she said. “After we took out their other destroyers, the _Steadfast_ was the only one with the capacity to house them. Every child they couldn’t hurry into Stormtrooper armour was still there. Eating, drinking, sleeping, training. Someone in there – some officer maybe – got them to go to the pods. The pods were leaving from the area that housed the cadets, that’s how we knew.

“We got lucky,” she admitted. “Pure, dumb luck. Kriff, it could only have been two seconds, but we were able to cover it up. It was crazy in that room, everyone running around, screaming out orders. Some TIE fighters started blasting us at just the right moment. And the next time we checked, all the pods were gone.”

Poe leaned his elbows onto the table, staring at Rose. What she was admitting to – it was a crime, yes. She had allowed enemy soldiers to escape into the unknown. But there was a detail, one that Poe desperately needed to know.

“What did he say?” he asked. “To make you change your mind?”

Her mouth twitched. “He said, ‘they’re just children’.”

“And you believed him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I was going to kill him and he knew it,” she said. “Anyone else in my position would have. He was looking death in the face and he just… he was fine with it. He only cared about the kids. I don’t think he actually thought I’d help him. That’s the thing about Hux,” she added, thoughtfully, as if to herself. “He’s been expecting death for a long time now. I can’t say we were ever close, but I did understand that about him.”

He could hear Armitage’s voice in his head, as if it had only been yesterday that Poe had visited him. _I knew this is where we would end up._ Staring death down as it approached on the horizon, he’d said. Rose had noticed, and Poe? Poe had been blind.

He realized Rose was looking at him sadly. “He’d forget about it, when he was with you,” she said. “I could tell. He was happy with you. Really happy.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, wanting to compose himself. “Thank you.”

“It’s not your fault, Poe,” Rose said. “It’s not any of our faults. It’s not even Hux’s fault, either, though I’m sure he thinks otherwise. The truth is that we’re all children of war.”

They sat in silence after that, for a few minutes, or perhaps longer. Rose drinking slowly, Poe staring at the table, or the wall. “Where's Dio?” she asked, gently.

She was really checking to see if he had left the little droid behind on CY-78. Poe pushed down his bitter laugh. She was right to question him – his reputation was not very kind to anyone, these days. “On my ship,” he said. “Too many strangers here. They upset him.”

Rose nodded. “Yeah, I guess they would,” she said. After a few moments of thought she placed her hand on the table, palm up, questioningly.

He didn't need to think about it; he was done being angry. Poe took her hand. Seeing that it was now, indeed, safe to greet her, BB-8 rolled closer and bumped against her knee.

“It's good to see you, Rose,” Poe said, quietly. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.”

  
  


The next day, Rose and Poe ate breakfast in the tavern before she went on her way. “Remember that time the generators went out in the middle of the night?” he asked, over caf. She laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “Four hours in the dark cursing at the tech and each other. Eventually he just started hitting one of them with a wrench and it came back on. I asked if they taught that in the First Order. He said he'd learnt it from Rey.”

Poe laughed – a real, full one, for the first time in a long time. “They did get along well,” he said. “I could never figure out why.”

“Me neither.”

As they said their goodbyes, Rose stopping to wrap her arms around BB-8's bulbous body, it occurred to Poe more strongly than ever before how Rose had been the strongest amongst them; she still was. _We just have to try to be better_ , she'd say, as an explanation whenever anyone questioned her on... anything, really. Why she consented to work with Armitage without complaint, why she held patience for even the surliest of people.

But it took strength to better yourself despite everyone else. It took bravery and conviction to believe in goodness and hope. Poe knew that because he had believed as strongly as anyone, even in the bloody depths of war, but now he stood alone and unloving, tired of trying anymore.

Poe held her tight for a few long moments before she stepped onto her transport, wanting some of her strength to transfer to him, yet feeling nothing but a deep, burning resentment at the world that he had fought and killed for, which had then taken Armitage from him. And he thought about how he'd wanted to laugh, hysterically, when he got the missive that CY-78 had been cleared for new generators as he'd been in Armitage's workshop, days after his arrest, desperately destroying anything the Republic could use against him.

Rose released him and stepped back. “May the Force be with you, Poe,” she said. He thought perhaps that she was blinking back tears.

He didn't want her to leave, but to ask her to stay would simply delay the inevitable. One day, he hoped, their paths would cross again. One day he could be strong. “And with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I love, love, love Rose and her getting edited out of TRoS is one of the many things I am devoted to fixing in fanfic. I know it's been awhile between this installment and the last, but please let me know what you think!


End file.
